1. Field of the Invention
Embodiments of the present invention generally relate to an enterprise messaging system and, more particularly, to a method and apparatus for providing a message trail of conversationally related messages.
2. Description of the Related Art
An organization may use an enterprise messaging system to facilitate communication between organization members and/or external resources. For example, the enterprise messaging system may be an email system (e.g., MICROSOFT Exchange) where a plurality of mailboxes is maintained for the organization members at a central mail server (e.g., MICROSOFT Exchange Server). Each client computer used by the organization members to sent email may have a corresponding client application installed (e.g., MICROSOFT Exchange Outlook).
Each mailbox includes a plurality of email messages (e.g., one or more sent messages and one or more received messages). Two or more email messages of the plurality of email messages may be conversationally related to each other. For example, the two or more email messages may be associated with the same conversation or share the same topic of discussion.
Current solutions are limited to discovering conversationally related email messages only by a handful of techniques. For example, a conversation thread includes a chain of conversationally related email messages where each email message is a reply to a previous email message or a forwarded message from the previous email message. Current solutions may only be able to create such a conversation thread if the “REPLY” feature is used. Current solutions, however, cannot recognize a conversationally related email message that is a reply to a previous email message if the “Reply” feature were not used and the organization member simply cut and pasted the body of the previous email message. Furthermore, the current solutions cannot recognize a conversationally related email message that includes the previous email message as an attachment. Moreover, the current solutions cannot recognize a conversationally related email message that conveys similar information as the previous email message.
Therefore, there is a need in the art for a method and apparatus for providing a message trail of conversationally related messages.